A Night At The George Observatory

A few weeks ago, I was able to attend a 'special event' at the George Observatory in Brazos Bend Park just south of Houston Texas. We arrived at sun down, and were given treats, coffee, and paper star maps. There were about 15 in the group, and we were going to spend some time in the main observatory on the 36" Gueymard Research Telescope, one of the largest telescopes in the US that is available for public viewing. After a brief introduction, we were led up to the observatory where it was lights off. They began the viewing session by picking out a few objects, starting with Jupiter. We got a great view of the bands and moons, however the eye piece that was in place shortened the focal length quite a bit and it didn't look much more impressive than my 6" AT6RC.

Second target was M3, and the eye piece was switched to something with more magnification, I overheard it was a Takahashi eye piece. This time, I was impressed. What had only appeared as a blur to me on my telescopes, now appeared brilliant, and I could make out hundreds of individual stars in the cluster. Additionally, they have 11" and 6" refractors hanging off the side, and the views through the 11" refractor were equally impressive.

We moved on to two of the Leo triplet (M65 & M66) galaxies next. Both fit in the FOV. They were fairly dark still despite the light gathering power of the scope. And much brighter objects were in the night sky for our next viewing.

It was interesting to see the arcane controls on such a large scope. Dials read out coordinates in arc hours, minutes and seconds. Coordinates were plotted from object to object. Once at a known location, they could plug in how far to rotate from the current object to get to the next, and used an iPad to look up coordinates of objects.

In all, it was a fun night, and they stayed as late as we wanted to punch in coordinates for new objects. The observatory is open most Friday and Saturday nights to the public. There's an admission fee, but plenty of scopes to check out. In addition to the three primary scopes in the main observatory, they also have a 14" Celestron SCT, and 18" Newtonian reflector in the West and East domes respectively.

An Overview of EKOS Astrophotography Suite on the Mac

This is the main EKOS window. On the left are tabs that represent different sections of the application.

EKOS is the capture suite that comes as part of the KStars Observatory software package. It's a free, fully automated suite for capturing on Mac, Linux, and PC. It's not to dissimilar to Sequence Guider Pro on the PC. While the capture suite comes with KStars, you're not limited to using KStars. EKOS will also allow you to send commands to your mount from SkySafari on the Mac as well.

I'll break down it's use and capabilities screen by screen.

Main Window

In the main window shown above, you see tabs that represent each part of the application which include the Scheduler, Mount Control, Capture Module, Alignment Module, Focus Module, and Guide Module. From the main window you will see the currently taken image, the seconds remaining in the next image, as well as which image number you are on during the sequence, and the percent complete of the entire sequence with hours, minutes, and second remaining in your sequence. Additionally to the right of your image, you see your target and tracking status, focus status, and guiding status.

Scheduler

This is the Scheduler window, where you can pick your targets, and assign capturing sequences to them.

From the Scheduler, you can pick your targets, and assign them capture sequences (which are set up in the imaging module). Additionally there are some overall parameters you can set here for starting a session and ending a session. If you have a permanent observatory, you do things here like open and close your observatory with startup and shut down sequences, or set parameters for when to run your schedule based on the twilight hour, weather, or phase of the moon. The scheduler lets you set up multiple imaging sessions, mosaics, and more. And as the twilight hour approaches, it will start up and pickup imaging based off of priorities you set, or object priorities based on their visibility in the night sky. Imaging sessions can be set for a single night, or can be taken over multiple nights if it wasn't able to complete them in a single night.

Mount Control

Mount control is fairly straight forward. This window shows the current aperture and focal length of your selected equipment. You can save multiple equipment configurations from this window for various telescope and guide scope combinations that you might have. Current tracking information is also shown in this window. If you select Mount Control in the upper right of the screen, it pops up a floating window with arrow buttons, speed and goto functions for manually controlling the mount. You can search for a target, and manually go to an object in the sky to start an imaging session without setting one up in the scheduler.

Capture Module

From here you control all aspects of your imaging camera including setting up imaging sequences. For instance, I might have 7 hours of night time to image before the sun rises. I can divide that time up between each filter, and save the sequence of 120 captures, at 60s each at -20°C for each individual filter, and save that as a sequence which I can later load and reuse anytime I want to run that session during a 7 hour window. Or I could say I want 20 hours total on an object, and set all parameters for each filter to accommodate a 20 hour session, and save it. Or maybe I want one session for LRGB, and one for narrowband imaging. You can also set flat, dark and bias sequences. Flats have an awesome automatic mode, where you can set a pre-determined ADU value, and it will expose each filter automatically to the same ADU and capture all your flats in a single automatic session. It also supports hardware like the FlipFlat so that flat sessions can be run immediately following a nights imaging session. Additionally you can set guiding and focus limits for imaging sessions, and control when your meridian flip occurs.

Focus Module

Here you can control all focus functions if you have a computer controlled focuser. I highly recommend getting one of these. Focusing can be set up to run automatically. It will capture a single image, and auto select a star, then run a sequence where it continues to capture, while moving the focuser in and out. Each time it is graphing the HFR on a curve plot trying to find the best point of focus. Depending on seeing conditions, it can get focusing down in 3-4 iterations, or sometimes 20. All parameters including threshold and tolerance settings for focusing are controlled in this window.

Alignment Module

From this window you can polar align (assuming you can see Polaris), and also plate solve to locate an object center window or improve GOTO accuracy. Since I can't see Polaris from my location, I have to use my mounts built in All Star Polar Alignment process, then I can come to this window to capture & solve a target to improve it's GOTO accuracy. There are several nice features accessible here. You can load a fits file from a previous imaging session, it will plate solve the image, then move your telescope to that precise point to continue an imaging session. Or you can select targets from the floating mount control window, then capture and solve, or capture and slew to bring the mount as close to center of the target as possible. EKOS automatically uses this function during an imaging session to initially align to a target, and then realign once the meridian flip occurs.

Guide Module

The guide module handles all guiding through your guide scope and camera. Press capture in the upper left, and hit guide, a star will be automatically selected, calibration starts, and once calibrated guiding begins. Additionally options can be set for dithering, and guide rate. For people who prefer PHD2, EKOS integrates seamlessly with it, and even shows PHD2's guiding graphs within the app and on your overview tab. I've not personally had any issues using the EKOS guiding, and it has an additional benefit of being able to reacquire a guide star after clouds interrupt your imaging session, and can continue the imaging session when it's clear again.

Overall thoughts

As someone who images regularly, and doesn't have a permanent setup (like an observatory), I like how much of the application can automate my nights imaging sessions. There is little else available on the Mac that is this full featured. The Cloudmakers suite comes in a close second for me, but is initially easier to set up and use. Additionally TheSkyX is also a full featured suite, however I've not used it. The setup process with EKOS isn't too difficult once you get an understanding of how the modules interact with each other and what all the options do. I hope this brief overview gives you enough of an idea that you can setup and use the software on your own. EKOS has a healthy number of contributors on the project, and regularly sees updates on a  monthly basis, and has good support through it's user forums.

The final image of M101 taken during this session that I captured the above screens from. This was actually 17 hours done over three imaging sessions.

The observatories on Haleakala

My family and I took a trip to Maui this past week. While we were there we made the trek up Haleakala park mountain to the peak to watch the sunset. It's a pretty wild drive that takes a little over an hour to do. But the views are amazing. The terrain looks a bit like being on Mars.

This is what processing a stack of 720 light frames looks like on an iMac Pro

1,000% CPU utilization in Astro Pixel Processor. I'm three hours into processing this stack of 720 luminance images for M101. It's currently 29% in writing the light stacked image. So I anticipate about 4 hours total to stack this set. Interestingly CPU utilization isn't maxed. This iMac Pro has 32GB RAM, and 8 cores clocked at 3.2 GHz.

Observatory Astronomy Image Catalog Application for the Mac

What do you do with the organized or unorganized chaos of your astrophotography library of images as you continue to add to it over time? I end up with dozens and dozens of folder within folder sorted by date and object. Well, Observatory has shown that there's a better way.

After importing your images (which is just a reference to your files on your drive, so very little additional space is required) you can plate solve the images for automatic tagging by all the known astronomical databases. The benefit of this is that any object you've purposely captured, or objects you inadvertently captured are tagged in your images. You can then create smart folders which then subdivide your set of images into nice little categories like galaxies, nebulas, planetary nebulas, etc.

Additionally you can batch tag your images with equipment you used, and also have those same images flow into smart folders for sets of equipment you used. The benefit being that you might have imaged a smaller galaxy or object with a wide FOV set of equipment, and you want to revisit that object with a narrow FOV set of equipment. This could really help in planning your imaging sessions going forward. And, if your'e a completionist like I am, and intend to image the whole Messier catalog, this is a great way to keep track of it.

Automatic tagging and smart folders, show you what images in your library match the criteria of the folder selected.

There are some light weight stacking, and calibration features that work well for one shot color cameras, which take folders of hundreds of images and displays them in a single stack to mitigate the clutter. I would like to see some way to integrate mono channels into single stacks by selecting each channel and assigning it a color.

Additionally, a small, but powerful feature of adding astronomical image types to quicklook is an amazingly beneficial too for browsing your images in the finder. No more loading images to see what they are, when you select one and press the spacebar, you see it instantly.

Some things I'd like to see come to a future version are better management tools for your equipment, since this is only done through tagging right now. I would like some place to store equipment I own, so it's easier to select when tagging images. I'd also like to see FOV overlays of my equipment on some of the research portions of the data. (Incidentally, the application has access to vast NASA libraries of images you can download into and view.) It would be nice to pull up a Hubble image and see how my gear could frame it, and what might be the best possible set of gear to use when planning a session on a particular object. Other information like object rise and set time based on my location would be beneficial for planning sessions.

In all though, this is a great v1 of a cataloging application for astronomical images, and I look forward to what v2 will bring.

M101 and surrounding nebula are auto tagged once the image is plate solved.

Markarian's Chain has an enormous amount of galaxies hidden deeper into the image that are only revealed after plate solving.

Astro-Tech 6" f/9 Ritchey-Chrétien Astrograph

HUBBLE AT HOME

A recent addition to my set of telescopes. This is probably the most economically viable Ritchey-Chrétien telescope money can buy. It can be found for around $350 at most places. I bought this one used for even less. The Ritchey-Chrétien design is probably most famous for being the same optical design that's in the Hubble Telescope. This is probably the largest scope I can feasibly put on my mount for weight reasons. The AVX has a 30lb max payload capacity, and the AT6RC is around 13lbs with no other gear. So, I'm probably pushing 18-20lbs of astronomical gear with this scope. Due to the long focal length, getting the polar alignment dialed in is crucial. But once set, I'm able to get some half way decent images out of it.

These images show all the gear set up and ready for a night of imaging. Pictured here is the AVX mount, AT6RC, Orion 60mm Guide scope, ZWO ASI1600MM-Cool camera for primary imaging, ZWO ASI224MC camera for guiding, the ZWO 8 slot electronic filter wheel with LRGB and Narrowband filters, an Astrozap dew heater on the guide scope, Astrozap dew shield, and a Bahtinov mask from Grosky.

M51, Whirlpool galaxy taken on this setup later that evening.

The 2017 iMac Pro Astrophotography Processing Workstation

Here she is. The 2017 iMac Pro, and my new astrophotography processing workstation. I've just moved up from a 2013 Mac Pro. The new setup includes two Dell P2715Q 27" 4k monitors along with the iMac's 5k 27" monitor. The iMac consists of an 3.2GHz 8-core Intel Xeon W CPU with 32GB RAM. Performance wise, it's about 2x as fast as my previous 6-core Mac Pro. It's connect to both a 6TB and an 8TB RAID storage solution. The 6TB is backup currently, and the 8TB stores all my data and work files.

I'm currently running Astro Pixel Processor on the left display for calibration and integration of captured images. I'm running PixInsight on the middle monitor for processing the integrated images, and I have PhotoShop running on the right hand monitor for last minute color touch up.

This setup might seem like overkill, and it probably is. It's primary use is as my home business graphic design and video system.

Pictured in the setup from left to right is the Dell P2715Q 4k Monitor below that is some Sennheiser HD 650 headphones, a Blu-ray disk drive, the Schiit Audio Asgard headphone AMP and PreAMP. Then the 2017 iMac Pro base model, a 1TB portable G-Drive for transferring images off my 13" 2015 MacBook Pro capturing laptop. A Sphero Star Wars BB-8 robot, World of Warcraft mouse pad, the other Dell P2715Q, and an XBOX 360 controller for games.

Above the monitors is a Mission Chart from when I worked at NASA. It features the mission and communications route for the Shuttle flight STS 51-G. Hanging to the left is a flowchart showing the history of Apple hardware up to the 2013 Mac Pro.

Yours truly…not an actual astronaut, and not an actual space suit.

Processing IC410

I imaged IC410 over a single night using my Explore Scientific 102mm FCD-100 telescope, ASI1600MM-Cool camera, and the ZWO narrowband filters. I took 75 images that were exposed for 5 minutes each. 25 HA, 25 OIII, and 25 SII images in total.

I used AstroPixel Processor to combine and integrate the images into a single master HA, OIII, and SII frame. From there I imported all three into PixInsight and followed this Light Vortex Astronomy tutorial for processing the individual frames. Note that their tutorial covers a two frame process, and I had three. I just applied the same processing techniques to each of my three frames.

Where I had to diverge from the above tutorial was when combining the images into a single color RGB image. I researched and found the following PixelMath formula for PixInsight to combine the 3 frames:

R:  0.5*SII + 0.5*HA
G:  0.15*HA + 0.85*OIII
B:  OIII

Once done, I wrapped up the tutorial and concluded with the finished image seen above.

I also went back to this same image and reprocessed it in the Hubble telescope pallet.

Starting out with mono Astrophotography

I took advantage of a recent sale on ZWO cameras, and sold my old color camera to move into mono imaging. The benefit of using mono is increased resolution and sensitivity in the camera. One shot color cameras have a Bayer matrix over the sensor which is like a screen door with red, green, and blue filters placed over every third pixel. These pixels are merged into a single color photograph in the software after the image is taken.

In a mono camera, you shoot black and white, and use a individual color filters over the entire sensor so that all of the sensor is shooting in that one color. After you're done imaging, you merge all the colors into a single higher fidelity image. Below is one of my first attempted color images using LRGB filters (Luminance, Red, Green, and Blue).

M42 (Orion Nebula) shot in LRGB on my ES102mm ED telescope.

Uranus in View

While taking pictures of the moon last night, I noticed Uranus was in view, so I pointed the telescope at it and took around 300 images to combine and stack into this final image.

Moonlite Focuser for the Explore Scientific 102ED CF

I upgraded to this Moonlite 2" crayford design focuser for a few reasons. The initial reason was that the compression ring clamp that came with the Explore Scientific scope didn't compress very well. The reducer I have has a beveled edge, and it just wouldn't grab it tight enough. The weight of the camera made the reducer shift in place, which made artifacts show up in my images from the shift. Secondary reason is that the built in drawtube is not very long, which means that to switch between imaging and visual, you have to add and remove extension tubes. With the Moonlite, the drawtube is 4.5" long and can accommodate both lengths just by rolling it in and out to the desired length. No more threading black extension tubes onto a black drawtube in the dark.

Installation was very straight forward. The focuser is collimated at the factory, so I only need to unbolt the 6 hex screws where it meets the OTA tube, and then replace them with the new focuser. Took about 10 minutes. My only gripe would be that I wish they included the allen wrench required for putting in the new screws. 

There are a few options you can order. I did the dual rate focuser, with focuser lock, and two vixen style mounts for finder scopes or laser pointers. Additionally you can add a stepper motor and electronic control for focusing from your computer. This is something I'll likely add later, but so far I've not had any issues with losing focus during the night.

First "real" attempt at imaging

About a week ago, I made my first "real" attempt to image something in the night sky. I say first real attempt, because I believe I have the correct equipment and setup that I'm willing to work with. It's taken me a year to get comfortable imaging objects in the night sky, and almost all of it has been a learning experience. 

For the first time, I have a scope, mount, camera, filter, proper imaging train, and enough knowledge to know how long to expose the object, take proper lights, flats, and bias images to achieve a decent outcome.  I think it's a great first attempt, and am happy with the results.

Joined the Planetary Society

Today I joined the Planetary Society to contribute to and advance science and a future in space exploration.